KATU (channel 2) is a
television station
A television station is a set of equipment managed by a business, organisation or other entity, such as an amateur television (ATV) operator, that transmits video content and audio content via radio waves directly from a transmitter on the eart ...
in
Portland, Oregon
Portland (, ) is a port city in the Pacific Northwest and the list of cities in Oregon, largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Situated at the confluence of the Willamette River, Willamette and Columbia River, Columbia rivers, Portland is ...
, United States, affiliated with
ABC. It is owned by
Sinclair Broadcast Group
Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc. (SBG) is a publicly traded American telecommunications conglomerate that is controlled by the descendants of company founder Julian Sinclair Smith. Headquartered in the Baltimore suburb of Cockeysville, Maryland, ...
alongside
La Grande–licensed
Univision
Univision () is an American Spanish-language free-to-air television network owned by TelevisaUnivision. It is the United States' largest provider of Spanish-language content. The network's programming is aimed at the Latino public and includes ...
affiliate
KUNP
KUNP (channel 16) is a television station licensed to La Grande, Oregon, United States, affiliated with the Spanish-language Univision network. It is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group alongside Portland-based ABC affiliate KATU (channel 2). Bot ...
(channel 16). Both stations share studios on NE Sandy Boulevard in Portland, while KATU's transmitter is located in the
Sylvan-Highlands section of the city.
KATU went on the air as the fourth commercial station in Portland in 1962. It was built by Fisher Broadcasting Company, later
Fisher Communications
Fisher Communications was a media company in the United States. Based in Seattle, Washington, the company primarily owned a number of radio and television stations in the Western United States. It was the last company in the Seattle area to own ...
, and originally served as an
independent station before joining ABC in 1964.
History
Channel 2 comes to Portland
![KATU studios entrance - Portland, Oregon (2015)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/KATU_studios_entrance_-_Portland%2C_Oregon_%282015%29.jpg)
Channel 2 was not initially assigned to Portland, being allocated in 1957. That action spurred activity on the valuable frequency. Four applications were initially received, from ''
The Oregon Journal
''The Oregon Journal'' was Portland, Oregon's daily afternoon newspaper from 1902 to 1982. The ''Journal'' was founded in Portland by C. S. "Sam" Jackson, publisher of Pendleton, Oregon's ''East Oregonian'' newspaper, after a group of Portlander ...
'', owner of
KPOJ (1330 AM);
Fisher Broadcasting Company, which owned
KOMO-AM-
KOMO-TV
KOMO-TV (channel 4) is a television station in Seattle, Washington, United States, affiliated with ABC. It is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group alongside Bellevue-licensed Univision affiliate KUNS-TV (channel 51). Both stations share studios w ...
in
Seattle
Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...
; Tribune Publishing Company, owner of
KTNT-TV in
Tacoma, Washington
Tacoma ( ) is the county seat of Pierce County, Washington, United States. A port city, it is situated along Washington's Puget Sound, southwest of Seattle, northeast of the state capital, Olympia, and northwest of Mount Rainier National Pa ...
; and
KPTV
KPTV (channel 12) is a television station in Portland, Oregon, United States. affiliated with the Fox network. It is owned by Gray Television alongside Vancouver, Washington–licensed MyNetworkTV affiliate KPDX (channel 49). Both stations ...
(channel 12), which wanted to move to channel 2.
KPTV later withdrew, and KPOJ dropped its application in March, but it was not until the end of 1959 that an FCC hearing examiner recommended Fisher over the Tribune Publishing Company for the channel 2 construction permit.
The full commission began drafting paperwork in support of this decision in December 1960, and Fisher received the permit on February 23, 1961.
Work began to build facilities in the former Crystal Laundry on NE Sandy Boulevard in June; the two-story building was refitted to contain two production studios. The station originally was assigned the call letters KOXO, but in line with its "K-2" brand, the station adopted the KATU designation that month.
KATU began broadcasting on March 15, 1962, originally operating as an
independent station; Portland native and actress
Jane Powell
Jane Powell (born Suzanne Lorraine Burce; April 1, 1929 – September 16, 2021) was an American actress, singer, and dancer who first appeared in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musicals in the 1940s and 50s. With her soprano voice and girl-next-door image ...
was the master of ceremonies.
The station's transmitter was originally located atop Livingston Mountain, about north-northeast of
Camas, Washington; this northerly site had been required to maintain minimum spacing to the unbuilt channel 3 at
Salem.
While it was the 25th independent in the United States, from the moment it went on air, speculation swirled that KATU might look to poach a network affiliation from one of the three other commercial stations in Portland.
Rumors intensified in June 1963 as KATU began construction of a transmitter in Portland's
West Hills, which would improve its signal coverage and co-site channel 2 with the other major stations. The news came in early December when ABC announced it would drop
KPTV
KPTV (channel 12) is a television station in Portland, Oregon, United States. affiliated with the Fox network. It is owned by Gray Television alongside Vancouver, Washington–licensed MyNetworkTV affiliate KPDX (channel 49). Both stations ...
(channel 12), Oregon's oldest television station, and move to KATU on March 1, 1964. The news led to speculation that the ABC switch to KATU, in spite of KPTV performance comparable to that of other ABC affiliates, was a countermove by the network to avoid losing Seattle's KOMO-TV, one of the network's few top-rated stations at the time, to a possible move by CBS. KPTV—which had been ABC's Portland affiliate since 1959—sued, alleging that Fisher coerced ABC into affiliating with KATU by threatening to defect in Seattle. (It was the second time KPTV had lost an affiliation to a group owner in five years;
King Broadcasting Company's
KGW-TV
KGW (channel 8) is a television station in Portland, Oregon, United States, affiliated with NBC and owned by Tegna Inc. The station's studios are located on Jefferson Street in southwestern Portland, and its transmitter is located in the city' ...
displaced KPTV as the NBC television affiliate in Portland in 1959, and its
KING-TV in Seattle replaced KOMO in the network lineup.
)
After a decade in which the station struggled to build an identity in the market, KATU began to find its way in the early 1970s after expanding its local programming. New shows such as public affairs program ''Town Hall'', weekend children's program ''Bumpity'', and talk show ''AM Northwest'' proved critical to the station's success. ''AM Northwest'' continues to air, while other shows, such as ''Faces & Places'' and ''Two at Four'', ended in the 1980s.
KATU was Portland's first commercial station to broadcast in digital, doing so in 1998 alongside
Oregon Public Broadcasting
Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) is the primary television and radio public broadcasting network for most of the U.S. state of Oregon as well as southern Washington. OPB consists of five full-power television stations, dozens of VHF or UHF tra ...
. KATU shut down its analog signal, over VHF channel 2, on June 12, 2009, the official date in which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 43, using
virtual channel
In most telecommunications organizations, a virtual channel is a method of remapping the ''program number'' as used in H.222 Program Association Tables and Program Mapping Tables to a channel number that can be entered via digits on a receiver's ...
2.
Sinclair Broadcast Group ownership
On April 10, 2013, KATU and Fisher Communications' other holdings were acquired by the
Sinclair Broadcast Group
Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc. (SBG) is a publicly traded American telecommunications conglomerate that is controlled by the descendants of company founder Julian Sinclair Smith. Headquartered in the Baltimore suburb of Cockeysville, Maryland, ...
. The
Federal Communications Commission
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains jurisdicti ...
granted its approval of the deal on August 7, and the sale was completed the following day.
On May 8, 2017, Sinclair Broadcast Group
entered into an agreement to acquire
Tribune Media
Tribune Media Company, also known as Tribune Company, was an American multimedia conglomerate headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.
Through Tribune Broadcasting, Tribune Media was one of the largest television broadcasting companies, owning 39 ...
—owner of
CW affiliate
KRCW-TV
KRCW-TV (channel 32) is a television station licensed to Salem, Oregon, United States, serving as the CW outlet for the Portland area. It is owned and operated by network majority owner Nexstar Media Group alongside CBS affiliate KOIN (chann ...
(channel 32)—for $3.9 billion, plus the assumption of $2.7 billion in debt held by Tribune, pending regulatory approval by the FCC and the
U.S. Department of Justice's Antitrust Division. Sinclair would have been required to sell one of KATU or KRCW-TV if the deal were to be approved. However, in 2018, the FCC designated the deal for hearing by an
administrative law judge
An administrative law judge (ALJ) in the United States is a judge and trier of fact who both presides over trials and adjudicates claims or disputes involving administrative law. ALJs can administer oaths, take testimony, rule on questions of evi ...
; the deal was then terminated by Tribune.
News operation
![KATU 2 (35963381014)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/KATU_2_%2835963381014%29.jpg)
From the station's first day on air, KATU produced local newscasts. As an independent, its late-night local news aired at 10 p.m. This changed after the station switched to ABC in 1964, but KATU remained mired in third place in local news coverage behind KOIN-TV and KGW-TV, which were said to have a "stranglehold" on Portland viewers.
One Oregon news event covered by KATU cameras in the station's first decade on air acquired lasting notoriety. In November 1970, reporter
Paul Linnman
Paul Linnman (born January 25, 1947) is an American former television news reporter and anchor in Portland, Oregon, and radio personality in the same city. He is perhaps best known for his 1970 KATU report on the attempt by the Oregon Highway Di ...
, who worked at KATU from 1967 to 1972 before returning to the station in 1984 and retiring from TV news in 2004, traveled to
Florence, Oregon
Florence is a coastal city in Lane County, in the U.S. state of Oregon. It lies at the mouth of the Siuslaw River on the Pacific Ocean and about midway between Newport and Coos Bay along U.S. Route 101. As of the 2020 census, the city had ...
, where a sperm whale washed ashore;
its carcass was exploded unsuccessfully. The station continued to receive requests for footage years after the event and has since commemorated anniversaries of the exploding whale, including a news special in 1995 and a remaster of the original newsfilm in 2020.
In 1975, Richard Ross left KGW-TV after 19 years to become the news director at channel 2. That same year, former Oregon governor
Tom McCall
Thomas Lawson McCall (March 22, 1913 January 8, 1983) was an American statesman, politician and journalist in the state of Oregon. A Republican, he was the state's thirtieth governor from 1967 to 1975. A native of Massachusetts, McCall grew up t ...
joined KATU as commentator; prior to becoming governor, he had also worked at KGW. Under Ross, the station produced such efforts as ''Kidwitness News'', a monthly newscast for kids anchored by puppets; the station's documentary unit won a
Peabody Award in 1981. McCall's commentaries continued appearing despite his battle with cancer leading up to his January 1983 death.
News hires at KATU in the 1980s included
Jeff Gianola, who initially joined as a weekend weather presenter in 1983 and became evening anchor before defecting to KOIN in 1998, and
Bill O'Reilly, the future
Fox News Channel anchor whose tenure in Portland lasted less than a year due to family reasons. O'Reilly's time with the station was marked by remarks about Portland being a "vacation" compared to his previous job in Boston, which displeased management, and an incident in which he left his paycheck in a copy machine, unwittingly divulging a six-figure salary that irked underpaid colleagues. By 1985, what had once been a five-person staff in the early days had become a 60-person news department.
KATU had worked its way up to having the top-rated newscasts in Portland by 1997, but ratings were starting to decline before Gianola's departure for KOIN, which was responsible for leading a resurgence at channel 6. In 1997, the station's general manager concocted a promotional strategy, known as the "Power of 2", by which the station acquired two news helicopters, in an attempt to increase falling ratings, even though the news director had previously said helicopters were primarily a marketing tool. The campaign was produced with such secrecy that its first airing took newsroom employees by surprise. Within a month of the highly publicized debut of the second helicopter, the leased helicopter, "JetRanger II", crashed and burned in November while harvesting Christmas trees.
By 2021, KATU had returned to first place in early and late evening news in total viewership, though Fox affiliate KPTV beat it out in morning news. That year, the station attracted industry attention for suspending an entire day of newscasts so the station staff could take stress management training in light of increasing burnout in television news.
Notable former on-air staff
*
Dick Bogle – reporter, and later anchor, from 1968 to 1982; later a city council member
*
Anna Canzano – anchor/investigative reporter
*
Jack Faust – hosted the weekly public affairs show ''Town Hall'' for 13 years (1980–1993)
*
Rob Marciano – meteorologist (1997–2003)
*
Cathy Marshall – reporter/anchor (1998–2003)
*
Tom Rinaldi
Tom Rinaldi is a reporter for Fox Sports. He previously contributed to ESPN's tennis coverage at Wimbledon and the US Open, ESPN's golf coverage, ''SportsCenter'', ''Outside the Lines'', '' College GameDay'' and '' Sunday NFL Countdown''. H ...
– lead reporter for
ESPN
ESPN (originally an initialism for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) is an American international basic cable sports channel owned by ESPN Inc., owned jointly by The Walt Disney Company (80%) and Hearst Communications (20%). Th ...
and contributor to ''
ESPN College Football'', now with
Fox Sports
Fox Sports is the brand name for a number of sports channels, broadcast divisions, programming, and other media around the world.
The ''Fox Sports'' name has since been used for other sports media assets. These assets are held mainly by the F ...
*
Roger Twibell – sports reporter (1973–75), now sportscaster for
CBS Sports Network
CBS Sports Network (a.k.a. CBSSN) is an American pay television network owned by the CBS Entertainment Group unit of Paramount Global. When it launched in 2002 as the National College Sports Network (later College Sports Television also known a ...
*
Brian Wood – reporter/anchor (2008–2021)
*
Linda Yu
Linda Yu (born December 1, 1946) is a Chinese-American former news anchor and author. Yu is best known as co-anchor on the Eyewitness newscast for WLS-TV in Chicago, Illinois from April 1984 until November 2016. Yu became Chicago's first Asianâ ...
– news anchor (1975)
Technical information
Subchannels
The station's digital signal is
multiplexed
In telecommunications and computer networking, multiplexing (sometimes contracted to muxing) is a method by which multiple analog or digital signals are combined into one signal over a shared medium. The aim is to share a scarce resource - a ...
:
The 32.1 subchannel for
KRCW-TV
KRCW-TV (channel 32) is a television station licensed to Salem, Oregon, United States, serving as the CW outlet for the Portland area. It is owned and operated by network majority owner Nexstar Media Group alongside CBS affiliate KOIN (chann ...
is broadcast by KATU as part of Portland's
ATSC 3.0
ATSC 3.0 is a major version of the ATSC standards for television broadcasting created by the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC).
The standards are designed to offer support for newer technologies, including HEVC for video channels of u ...
(NextGen TV) deployment plan; in exchange, KRCW-TV broadcasts KATU in that format.
Translators
KATU is additionally rebroadcast over a network of sixteen
low-power digital
translator stations:
*
Astoria: K26DB-D
*
Baker Valley: K27MX-D
*
Corvallis: K08PZ-D
*
Hood River: K28CQ-D
*
La Grande: K32LY-D
*
La Grande: K35GA-D
*
Lincoln City, etc.: K32NK-D
*
Madras: K26NX-D
*
Milton-Freewater: K28FT-D
*
Pendleton: K34DI-D
*
Prineville
Prineville is a city in and the seat of Crook County, Oregon, United States. It was named for the first merchant located in the present location, Barney Prine. The population was 9,253 at the 2010 census.
History
Prineville was founded in 187 ...
: K35LD-D
*
Rainier: K31HK-D
*
Rockaway Beach: K23NS-D
*
The Dalles
The Dalles is the largest city of Wasco County, Oregon, United States. The population was 16,010 at the 2020 census, and it is the largest city on the Oregon side of the Columbia River between the Portland Metropolitan Area, and Hermiston ...
: K18HH-D
*
Tillamook Tillamook may refer to:
Places:
* Tillamook County, Oregon, United States
* Tillamook, Oregon, a city, the seat of Tillamook County
* Tillamook River, United States
* Tillamook Bay, a bay in the northwestern part of Oregon
* Tillamook Head, a natu ...
: K34PJ-D
*
Grays River/
Lebam, WA: K20NL-D
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Katu
ABC network affiliates
Charge! (TV network) affiliates
Comet (TV network) affiliates
Stadium (sports network) affiliates
Sinclair Broadcast Group
Peabody Award winners
Television channels and stations established in 1962
ATU
Atu may refer to:
* Atu, a character in Samoan mythology
* Atu Bosenavulagi, an Australian rules footballer
* Atu, Iran, a village in Iran
* Atu Moli, New Zealand rugby union player
* Atu'u is a village on Tutuila Island, American Samoa
ATU may re ...
1962 establishments in Oregon